![]() ![]() ![]() In response to casual antisemitism from their fellow passengers, her new shipboard friend, Essie, exclaims through humiliated tears: “And that’s what counts for loyal patriots these days, Florence! First-class American flag-waving bigots. Krasikov writes with a poetic ear for sound and cadence Florence is variously compared to Odysseus, Cinderella and Dr Faustus, and there is a compelling momentum to her initially idealistic journey. The Patriots contains elements of family saga, corporate thriller, historical novel and philosophical bildungsroman. ![]() ![]() Like Krasikov’s father, Julian is refused a PhD after years of research because the quota for Jews is full. Some of the characters’ experiences are based on things that happened to her family. Krasikov herself was born in Ukraine, grew up in Soviet Georgia, moved to New York in the 1980s and lives there today. At the heart of this weighty and engaging novel are true stories: hundreds of Americans living in the USSR in the 1930s were abandoned by the US government and got trapped in Stalin’s terror. His simultaneous attempts to extract his mother’s declassified file from “the still-warm bowels of the Soviet Union” are among the plot’s many metaphorical parallels. Commuting between Washington and Moscow, Julian designs icebreakers to extract oil from the Russian arctic. ![]()
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